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Short Days—Long Nights

Mid-December days in Ferndale, stranded on the northern edge of the continental U.S., sunlight is in short supply. When Albert, the border collie, takes me out around the Gardiner pond in the morning, the sun is barely risen, and he has trouble herding me out there before sunset in the afternoon. In all this gloom, I was looking for adventure last week, so I drove to Montana and back again.

Our daughter completed her first semester of law school in Missoula last Friday. She and her sons could have traveled by train or airplane, but I was in adventure mode, so at 5:30 am Friday the 13th, I fired up my wife’s SUV that wouldn’t make it up the little hill to our house in the snow last winter and went off in the darkness to pick them up and bring them back for Christmas. December isn’t the most interesting month to drive I-90, but it gets close.

In these short days, the trip began and ended in the dark, both coming and going. That’s about how I feel in 2019 in general, so there was nothing special there.

The path from Ferndale to Missoula threads over three mountain passes: Snoqualmie, Fourth of July, and Look Out. Our house on Vista Drive in Ferndale is 154 feet above sea level; downtown Ferndale is only 36 feet. Snoqualmie summit is 3,022 feet, Fourth of July pass in Idaho is 3,081, and Lookout Pass on the Idaho-Montana border is 4,711 feet. Missoula is higher than the Snoqualmie at 3,209 feet. In other words, I had my ups and downs last weekend.

The adventure was tame, as befits an arthritic geezer. Both Snoqualmie and Fourth of July were bare wet pavement both coming and going. Mid-morning Friday, the sunshine revealed two beached and dug in semis that must have slid off the road on ice around Cle Elum, but that happened hours before I sailed through. Lookout Pass eastbound was slushy and busy. No real danger. Coming down Lookout, boxed in by big trucks front and back, squeezed between the concrete jersey barrier and another truck, and dirty slush flying everywhere, barely evoked philosophical thoughts on the fragility of these carcasses we carry around. It was snowing hard when we left Missoula, but Montana snowplow crews know their business. Maybe next time will have more adventure.

I like the freshwater flyover country, as the vast tract of the U.S. that is not on a seacoast is called by disrespectful coastervators. I’ve always liked it, and I like it better now. My Dutch and German ancestors established themselves in Michigan and Minnesota before coming to Whatcom County. When I was growing up, I heard stories about “Back East,” which referred to the Midwest rather than the east coast. When neighbors got together to talk, the east coast, New York, New England, the southern eastern seaboard were seldom mentioned, but the conversation often drifted into reminiscing on life in the Midwest. People occasionally took trips to see relatives back east, but seldom did that mean seeing the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve been on the east coast many times because I worked for a New York company, but I still get north and south confused when the ocean is to the east.

Fifty years ago, I went to college and graduate school in the Midwest and I soon noticed that Midwesterners were behind the west coast, even dear old Ferndale. The fonts on street signs were not as modern. The buildings were older, stores were laid out like throwbacks from decades in the past. I knew nothing of New York then, but a lot of New Yorkers were among my fellow students, and they all said Chicago was way out of step. Of course, there never has been and never will be anything as in step as New York, in the opinion of a New Yorker.

I think it’s the internet.

I poked around Missoula during my one day there. I discovered that Missoula has more local breweries than Bellingham or hop city Yakima. I sampled several Missoula IPAs that proved that their brewers know distinctive hop flavors and how to blend them. A far cry from the watery “fire brewed for the flamin’ a—” Stroh’s and Iron City Pittsburgh beer that I remember from college.

I visited the University of Montana Law Library and the Missoula Public Library. The law library was sleek and new; the public library was nice, but crowded, the carpets had seen better days, and the furniture was worn. However, the staff pointed across the street to a large new library under construction. Missoula’s computer network is fast. I was told that they are almost entirely fiber. A city on the move as fast as New York or San Francisco.

I am getting old, but I think something is happening in this country that has not been noticed. Computer networks and the social media, other new forms of communication, have been excoriated for causing divisiveness and polarization, but I have begun to suspect that these vicious trends are being whittled away from the ground up by the very means of communication that are condemned as the cause.

I remember how isolated I felt before computer networks connected everyone. Today, no one has to wonder what is going on with the hipsters of Brooklyn— you can easily find out firsthand by following them on Twitter, Instagram, reading their blogs, or friending them on Facebook. (And see how silly they can be.) Like the proverbial canine, on the internet, no one knows you’re from Ferndale, Missoula, Austin, New Orleans, or NYC. In Missoula, people on the street, the streets themselves, could have been in New York, or the Bay Area, Boston, or Austin. I discussed hops with bartenders and library trends with Missoula’s library staff; we shared a base of knowledge that would have been impossible even ten years ago. This was not bland leveling, more like everyone being their best selves.

The days are short now and the nights are long. But winter solstice is close. The days will get longer; we will see more sunshine. Winter won’t be over, but spring is on the horizon.

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Getting Ready for Christmas

My neighbors in Ferndale are putting up ambitious displays of Christmas lights and decorations. I’ve only gotten as far as getting some holly trimmings from the Waschke Homestead and wiring together a wreath for our front porch. My neighbor’s work reminds me that Christmases sixty years and more ago were quite different.

Whatcom County settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were mostly northern Europeans: Scandinavians, Germans, and Dutch. My great grandparents were born in Holland and Germany, migrating to Whatcom County via Michigan and Minnesota in the Midwest. They brought Christmas traditions with them.

My Dutch grandparents were stern Calvinists who preferred their holidays on the solemn side, but German Lutherans reveled in Christmas tradition, an occasion for noisy family gatherings and extended visits. I grew up in the same house and later across the road from my German grandparents, so I know their traditions best.

Christmas trees are a German custom. My dad told us about Christmas trees in the old farmhouse decorated with burning candles and balls of cotton. Grandpa would cut a fir or hemlock in the woods and put it up on Christmas Eve afternoon. First lighting of the tree was after Christmas Eve church. They kept the tree and lit it regularly until Epiphany nearly two weeks later. Without water. Yikes! The rest of Christmas was less hair-raising.

My German grandmother was born in Germany, arriving on Ellis Island when she was twelve and travelling with her family directly to Whatcom County. She was my most direct connection to German Christmas traditions.

Grandma had cookbooks, but I never saw her using one. She cooked by taste, instinct, and practice. At Christmas, her talents flowered. Christmas dinner was a roast goose, not a turkey, stuffed with a sweet stuffing made from dry bread, apples, raisins, sugar, and cinnamon.

One secret of her roast goose was her bread, which she always baked herself. My mother baked bread too, but I liked Grandma’s better. Grandma saved the water from boiling potatoes for bread baking in a large Horlick’s Malted Milk jar that we now have on display in our living room. She may have used some milk also, and I am sure she used ordinary white flour. I remember watching Grandma bake bread, but the only other detail I recall is that she used a yeast cake that she would soak in water on baking day mornings. She had a combination wood and electric oven and she had a fire burning in the fire box when she baked, which may have had something to do with her results.

I’ve never had bread like hers anywhere else. Her loaves were rounded, and the crust was crisp like a French baguette, but not as tough. The texture was coarser and dryer with larger air holes than my mother’s bread. The taste was floury without sourness. Grandma would give me thick slices with butter as a snack. For herself, instead of toast, she cut bread into cubes and fried them in butter in a cast iron frying pan. I still remember the smell.

Few days before Christmas, Grandma put bread slices in a large sky-blue enameled steel basin to dry. Early Christmas morning, she would crumble the bread and add sliced apples, raisins, and a sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar. She would also lightly fry the chopped giblets in butter with salt and pepper and mix them into the stuffing. If she decided the mixture was too dry, she’d add milk. At this point, the scent of apples, raisins, and cinnamon began to whisper that Christmas dinner was coming soon.

Unlike folks today who are cautious about contamination, Grandma stuffed her goose rather than bake dressing on the side. She sprinkled the goose with sugar, cinnamon, and crumbs from the stuffing before putting it in the oven. The smell of goose roasting with my Grandma’s stuffing is the smell of Christmas for me. Add to that sweet and sour red cabbage with apples and you have the tastes and odors of Christmas day.

Before Christmas, Grandma baked Pretzel. Her Pretzel was nothing like the pretzels you buy in sacks at the grocery store or the soft pretzels they sell at the mall. It was a sort of plump raisin roll made with her homemade bread dough. She would pat out her dough in a round maybe an inch thick, spread it with butter, raisins, and sugar. Then roll it up like a big cinnamon roll and bring the ends together and cross them. Sprinkle with sugar and bake. Grandma’s Pretzel was a bread and not sweet enough to be called a dessert. She would serve it sliced for breakfast or with coffee. I think it was a variant of German Neujahrsbrezel, New Year’s Pretzel, but Grandma’s was special for Christmas breakfast.

She also baked Springerle cookies and her variant of Lebkuchen. Her Springerles were similar to many recipes you can find. She had the usual carved rolling pin to mold them. They came out, like all good Springerles, hard as stone and strongly flavored with anise. Her Lebkuchen were also flavored with anise and hard, so hard that slamming them down on the table to shatter them into dipping size for dunking in coffee was a good way to avoid cracking a tooth.

She began baking her Lebkuchen early in December. After mixing the very stiff dough, she let it rest to develop flavor for a few days. Then she rolled out the spicy mixture in a thin layer and cut it into two to three-inch squares and rectangles. My mother made them also, but she used Christmas cookie cutters in wreath, star, Santa Claus, and, for me, cowboy shapes. After baking, Grandma frosted them with a hard and shiny powdered sugar glaze. When they were dry, she put them in a crock with a towel on top to age, to soften, in theory, I suppose.

We called them Christmas cookies, not Lebkuchen. There are many variants on Lebkuchen in Germany. Most of them are more like a soft gingerbread than ceramic tile. One variant I know of is Aachener Printen, which are hard like my grandmother’s. Another variant is baked on communion wafers to prevent sticking.

When I was young, I didn’t much care for Christmas cookies. Even the cowboy shaped ones. They were too hard, not very sweet, and I preferred chocolate and caramel to anise and spices. But today? My grandmother’s hard Christmas cookies with coffee on a winter mid-afternoon after throwing down silage and mixing a batch of feed for the cows, or cutting stove logs in the woods, sounds closer to perfection than I will ever approach again.


 

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What a Terrible Way to Begin a Novel! But I Love It


Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator begins with a description of Dillsborough. Might as well call it Dullsville.

Trollope explains that Dillsborough county has no special landmarks, the village is small, the populace is mediocre, the curate doesn’t preach well, the church is shabby, the prominent families are not that prominent, and no one is notably prosperous. Nothing of interest. He goes on to describe the family history of several generations of the Morton and the Masters clans. Somewhat complex, as most family histories are, but devoid of dramatic tension. Dillsborough is dull. The residents of Dillsborough are dull. Ho hum. Is there a Seahawks game on TV? I’m not a football fan, but when there’s nothing better…


Why would anyone want to read this book? Well, I, for one, love it. I’m reading it a second time now with an online Trollope reading group. If you like Trollope, join the group. It’s informed, witty, welcoming, and civil. If you like Trollope, you’re one of us.

I bought a copy of The American Senator in the book department of Harrods on a business trip to London twenty years ago. A few years before, I received Trollope’s headliner Barsetshire and the Palliser series as a premium for joining the New York Review of Books book club, read, and enjoyed both series, but I had not read much else of Trollope. I was surprised at Harrods’ range of Trollope titles. I came home with as many of Trollope’s less well-known books as I could cram into my roll-aboard and read them all soon after.

I am in the straits of interesting a literary agent in my own novel and have read more about how to construct a compelling story than is likely good for anyone. Trollope breaks all the so-called story rules in the first three chapters of The American Senator.

Henry James complained that Trollope talked to his readers too much. He does that in the first few chapters of The American Senator. When a little interest sparks, the omniscient narrator informs us more will be said later about this person or that place, so we best not trouble our little heads about it. Today, critics would cite Trollope for reader abuse if such a thing could be done, but they would be wrong. Anthony Trollope was no fool. When The American Senator was written, he was a seasoned novelist with his craft well in hand. He was economical and he knew how to keep his story lines straight.

An omniscient narrator is somewhat rare these days, but it’s one of Trollope’s strengths. His narrator is a character speaking in the first person. The narrator is not an active participant in the story line, but he is a distinct and appealing personality. The reader hears the narrator’s voice as he tells the story and his role is as important as any of the plot characters. At times, I suspect that Trollope is offering us an unreliable omniscient narrator, if such a chimera can be permitted. I don’t question the omniscience of the narrator’s knowledge of events, but sometimes I catch a hint that the narrator’s commentary is designed to raise the reader’s hackles rather than represent an interpretation that Trollope, the author, believes is true.

From the day I started reading Trollope, I was amazed at Trollope’s descriptions of people and places that are fiercely remote from my experiences as a farm boy and software engineer, and yet somehow as familiar as neighbors across the line fences when I was growing up. The first chapters of The American Senator exercise that draw on me. Trollope’s descriptions are perfectly scaled to yield a sense of living community. In The American Senator, he adds piquancy to familiarity with the observations on Dillsborough society from a bizarre apparition from a sister planet in a distant galaxy, an American Senator from the imaginary state of Mikewa.

By the time Trollope wrote The American Senator, he was an experienced novelist and author; critics like me should not kid themselves; he knew exactly how far he could go before events had to begin to pop. And he knew how to build a setting to turn pops into explosions.

Trollope exercised some brinkmanship in these three ostensibly dull beginning chapters. The American Senator is anything but dull as the narrative rolls out and the story is enhanced by its contrast with a seemingly dull backdrop. He risked putting impatient readers off, but Trollope was saying “See, even in this dull place, life is intense and dramatic.” The seasoned master novelist takes readers to the edge of boredom, plays them with telling details, then yanks them back like a fly fisherman luring mountain trout.

The first three chapters of The American Senator are clearly not the failure predicted by modern novel writing rules or Henry James’ scolds. And I don’t accept the snide explanation that Victorian readers were starved for entertainment and therefore willing to suffer boring introductions to overly long novels. These chapters are successful for a significant swathe of readers of any era including the digital network age of the twenty-first century.